Because I have to take screen grabs from this footage to use in my graphics I have to look at it all to find the best pictures to use.

Unfortunately much of the international news lately has been about the escalation of violence in the middle east.

So I see what you don\’t get to see on the t.v. The parts of footage that are too shocking and upsetting to broadcast.

You can probably imagine what I am talking about.

Last week this really got to me. I came home feeling very black about the world, and as I lay in bed cried for all these people.

I sit in my office and my comfortable home and spare not much thought for those in the world who have war and violence on their doorstep. Those who spend everyday wondering if they, their relatives or their homes will still be there the next day. Those who get shuffled from place to place as their homelands are too dangerous to live in.

Do most of us really know how lucky we are, even with the problems we do have?

Compared to what I have seen in the last couple of weeks our problems at least are surmountable. Theirs certainly are not. Most of them cannot control or avoid what is going on around them. For most of them there is no escape from the terror they live with everyday.

For those of us lucky enough not to have experienced war on our doorstep we cannot understand the hardships that these people face.

My mother lived in Germany during WWII and she could never stand the noise of thunder here in Australia because it reminded her of the bombings she experienced during that time.

She would shake and cover her ears whenever we had a thunderstorm, and even though she understood logically it was not a bomb, somehow her mind could not stop her from feeling the fear that she felt back then.

So I am very thankful for the life I have, even with all the problems I have endured, they seem small in comparison to what others in the world face everyday.

So you\’ve decided to get yourself a human being. In doing so, you\’ve joined the millions of other cats who have acquired these strange and often frustrating creatures.

There will be any number of times, during the course of your association with humans, when you will wonder why you have bothered to grace them with your presence.

What\’s so great about humans anyway? Why not just hang around with other cats? Our greatest philosophers have struggled with this question for centuries, but the answer is actually rather simple:

THEY HAVE OPPOSABLE THUMBS.

Which makes them the perfect tools for such tasks as opening doors, getting the lids off of cat food cans, changing television stations, and other activities that we, despite our other obvious advantages, find difficult to do ourselves. True, chimps, orang-utans, and lemurs also have opposable thumbs, but they are nowhere as easy to train.

2. How and When to Get Your Human\’s Attention

Humans often erroneously assume that there are other, more important activities than taking care of your immediate needs, such as conducting business, spending time with their families, or even sleeping.

Though this is dreadfully inconvenient, you can make this work to your advantage by pestering your human at the moment it is the busiest. It is usually so flustered that it will do whatever you want it to do, just to get you out of its hair. Not coincidentally, human teenagers follow this same practice.

Here are some tried and true methods of getting your human to do what you want:

Sitting on paper: An oldie but a goodie. If a human has paper in front of it, chances are good it assumes the paper is more important than you. It will often offer you a snack to lure you away. Establish your supremacy over this wood pulp product at every opportunity. This practice also works well with computer keyboards, remote controls, car keys, and small children.

Waking your human at odd hours: A cat\’s \”golden time\” is between 3:30 and 4:30 in the morning. If you paw at your human\’s sleeping face during this time, you have a better than even chance that it will get up and, in an incoherent haze, do exactly what you want. You may actually have to scratch deep sleepers to get their attention; remember to vary the scratch site to keep the human from getting suspicious.

3. Punishing Your Human Being

Sometimes, despite your best training efforts, your human will stubbornly resist bending to your whim. In these extreme circumstances, you may have to punish your human. Obvious punishments, such as scratching furniture or eating household plants, are likely to backfire; the unsophisticated humans are likely to misinterpret the activities and then try to discipline YOU. Instead, we offer these subtle but nonetheless effective alternatives:

* Use the cat box during an important formal dinner.

* Stare impassively at your human while it is attempting a romantic interlude.

* Stand over an important piece of electronic equipment and feign a hairball attack.

* After your human has watched a particularly disturbing horror film, stand by the hall closet and then slowly back away, hissing and yowling.

* While your human is sleeping, lie on its face.

4. Rewarding Your Human: Should Your Gift Still Be Alive?

The cat world is divided over the etiquette of presenting humans with the thoughtful gift of a recently disembowelled animal. Some believe that humans prefer these gifts already dead, while others maintain that humans enjoy a slowly expiring cricket or rodent just as much as we do, given their jumpy and playful movements in picking the creatures up after they\’ve been presented.

After much consideration of the human psyche, we recommend the following: cold-blooded animals (large insects, frogs, lizards, garden snakes, and the occasional earthworm) should be presented dead, while warm-blooded animals (birds, rodents, your neighbour\’s Pomeranian) are better still living. When you see the expression on your human\’s face, you\’ll know it\’s worth it.

5. How Long Should You Keep Your Human?

You are obligated to your human for only one of your lives. The other eight are up to you. We recommend mixing and matching, though in the end, most humans (at least the ones that are worth living with) are pretty much the same. But what do you expect? They\’re humans, after all. Opposable thumbs will take you only so far.

She was still beautiful when she died at 84 January 06, as many of you know I have posted blogs about her before.

I don\’t have any children and at 44 I don\’t expect I will end up having any, so I guess Fluffybutt and Truffles are really my babies, so why can\’t they cook me breakfast in bed. Oh that\’s right cats don\’t have opposable thumbs.

Anyway back to why today hurt so much.

When my mother was sick she made a will which made me sole beneficiary of the house she and my father owned.

Since she died my half siblings (different father) have been fighting with me over the will. I have been to several lawyers but it is still so far from being sorted out. My sisters have put a caveat on the property which means I must now get another lawyer. The unfortunate thing is my brother is the other executor of the will along with myself.

So my appointment is on Tuesday and since I won\’t have time to get all the documentation together tomorrow I have been doing it today. Going through the bitter letters my siblings have written to me over the last year or so.

I guess the thing that hurt me most was finding a birthday card that my brother and his family consisting of his wife, his daughter and her husband, his son and his girlfriend gave to my mother on her 84th birthday about a month before she passed away. It had six signatures on one card and that was all they gave her. I could not believe this, I was utterly disgusted. They all lived not more than two minutes drive away from her yet they never visited.

So I don\’t know how long this is going to drag on for and I have definitely had enough and just want it to be over, but no one else seems to want to work this out (except on their terms, which is I divide the house up between us). I have offered to meet them and speak to them and they refuse, they will not speak to my lawyers on the phone.

Hopefully the new lawyer I am going to see on Tuesday will be able to sort this out, because I am tired of thinking about everything over and over again.

I have been working really hard. The university that I work at, twice a year does a news broadcast on community tv. This is for journalism students to get a close to real experience as possible. They do all the reporting and the presenting. The rest of the staff are professionals.

So for seven weeks I am doing the graphics that sit behind the head of the newsreader for each story that is reported.

I start at around 9.30am (which is pretty good) but I work solidly until 5.45pm without a lunch break as I don\’t have time.

Yesterday I went to the hospital to have a mammogram and an ultrasound to make sure my breast tumour has not come back. Thank goodness all is normal. So I bought myself a new pair of shoes (see photo) and the cutest little black pinafore dress.

On Wednesday my friend Paul did a great gig at a local bar playing his original music. I am not biased at all but he was the best performer on the night. I have put a video clip that I took of him up on YouTube and I am hoping he doesn\’t mind. So if you want to see him in action click this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVM0kAZDeUk